Death Certificates Key To Arsenic Murders

It is ironic the current push in the General Assembly to restrict public access to death certificates is the result of the mass murder at Newtown's Sandy Hook Elementary School in December.

That's because nearly a century ago it was death certificates that led to the arrest and conviction of a woman suspected of poisoning more than 20 patients at her nursing home, a case that became the inspiration for the play "Arsenic and Old Lace.'

Nellie Pierce, the sister of one of the victims, first approached Hartford County State's Attorney Hugh Alcorn in summer of 1914 with her concern that her brother's sudden death was not the result of natural causes. Alcorn heard Pierce out but did not follow up.

Nearly two years later, when state police charged Amy Archer Gilligan with murder in the first degree, newspapers circumspectly reported Alcorn did not believe Pierce's concerns warranted the expense of an official investigation.

Clifford Sherman, however, had taken Pierce seriously. When Pierce realized Alcorn was not acting on her concerns, she brought them to Sherman, the managing editor of The Hartford Courant.

Unlike Alcorn, Sherman was interested and assigned two reporters to follow up on Nellie Pierce's suspicion that her brother Franklin Andrews was poisoned.

Sherman dispatched one reporter to the town hall in Windsor, where Gilligan operated the Archer Home for the Aged and Infirm. The reporter, Aubrey Maddock, meticulously went through nearly five years of death certificates, weeding out the records of every person who had died at Gilligan's home during that period.

Maddock then went to Hartford City Hall, where he examined the death certificates of those who had died while in the care of that city's larger Jefferson Home during the same five years.

Back at the office, Maddock and Sherman created a primitive spreadsheet on a piece of newsprint. The numbers were startling. During the previous five years, Gilligan's home experienced, on average, 12 deaths a year, a number equal to her average census. The much larger Jefferson Home, which housed about 85 patients at any time, also averaged about 12 deaths per year — or about one per seven patients.

Sherman then sent his men to examine the "poison registers" each druggist was required to maintain — and which the law required be made public.

At one of the two drug stores in Windsor, the reporters discovered Archer had bought two pounds of arsenic, an astounding amount given that a fatal dose for an adult is generally considered to be two to three grains — about 0.0091429 of an ounce.

While it was not the sort of proof needed to prove a crime, the numbers were disturbing. The Courant's editors brought their findings to Gov. Marcus Holcomb, who ordered a state police investigation.

The police confirmed all The Courant's findings, and the bodies of five former patients were autopsied. All had been poisoned, according to the toxicologist.

Archer was arrested on an indictment charging her with five counts of first-degree murder, but state officials declared she may have been responsible for the deaths of 20 or more of her patients. If so, they said, it would be the worst mass murder (the term serial murder was not yet used) in the nation's history to that point.

Gilligan was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison.

A century later, details of the case have faded from our collective memory, but Gilligan's murderous spree lives on thanks to the fanciful dramatization of Joseph Kesselring, who wrote the play "Arsenic and Old Lace," which was made into a movie.

The lesson here is simple and obvious: Without open access to public documents, Gilligan may have eluded detection and punishment. This is important, because the two bills in the legislature are in response to Newtown Town Clerk Debbie A. Aurelia, who was upset by what she considered the unseemly search for facts by the news media after the deadly school shooting in her town.

"In the eight years I have been in office I have seen only relatives, authorized agencies … and attorneys requesting these documents and urge that we officially change the law," she told the legislature's public health committee.

One proposal would make available only a short form of the current death certificate. The other would seal the death certificates of those under 18 for six months.

These are understandable responses to the Sandy Hook massacre. But they are unnecessary and harmful in the long run. Even state Chief Medical Examiner Wayne Carver testified against changing the current law. "When an individual dies and the reason is not known, speculation and misinformation abound," Carver testified.

Facts are the fresh air and sanitizing sunshine of our democracy. The proposals make allowance for access by an "authorized agent of a state or federal agency." But as The Day of New London pointed out in a recent editorial, the public cannot always rely on government agencies to protect its interests.

What if this had been law in 1914?

History tells us State's Attorney Alcorn, "an authorized agent," fell down on the job. If The Courant did not have legally mandated access to the death certificates and poison registers, Gilligan's heinous acts might never have been uncovered.

As the General Assembly declared in the preamble of the state's freedom of information act, "the people in delegating authority do not give their public servants the right to decide what is good for them to know."

Let's keep it that way.

Ron Robillard, a journalist, is working on a book about Amy Archer Gilligan. This first appeared in The Chronicle in Willimantic.